Arts & Entertainment – Page 2

One Thing I Like About John Wick

John Wick manages to accomplish a lot with the mantra of “tell, don’t show”

After over a decade of cultural diffusion — marketing campaigns for four movies and now a spin-off, countless memes, the character’s appearance in video games — the act of actually watching any of the John Wick movies seemed like just a formality. I assumed that whatever magic was inside had dried up a long time ago, and I was impossibly late to the party.

But after watching the first movie, I suspect that it might’ve been excellent timing. This is a movie about a character whose reputation precedes him. So much of John Wick is devoted to scenes establishing what a fearsome bad-ass John Wick is, without actually showing him being a bad-ass. I’d imagined it would be an hour and a half of non-stop slow-motion gunfights in purple-lit nightclubs, but that doesn’t really make up the bulk of the running time. Instead, we get lots and lots of people telling us how scary he is.

This is delivered best by the bad guy Viggo, a mobster who talks about Wick as if he were a fairy tale. He’s not the boogeyman; he’s the guy they send to kill the boogeyman! Much of this is in Russian, with stylized subtitles filling much of the screen, certain words given particular emphasis.

They’re light on specifics. The only actual story I can recall is when Viggo says that Wick once killed two men with just a pencil. A pencil! I felt like I wasn’t sufficiently impressed by this detail, though: I’ve already seen The Dark Knight and don’t consider it that much of a stretch to imagine how a pencil could be used as a lethal weapon.

As it is, the first time we see Wick really show his stuff is when he kills a bunch of dudes (presumably; they’re in masks) trying to get into his house, in a vain attempt to stop his pending killing spree. We know that he kills twelve of them, but I’ve got to say it feels like pretty rote stuff. Certainly more home intruders than I would be able to kill, but not exactly an unprecedented number for an action movie.

But by that point, the movie has done a really good job of establishing its vibe. I was already familiar with a lot of the “Wick-iverse” from the aforementioned cultural diffusion, so I knew about the hotel that catered to assassins and had a strict code of no-killing-allowed. But I’d imagined that all of it would be bigger, or given out in small dollops of lore across at least the first two movies.

Instead, I was pleasantly surprised by the restraint in John Wick. It’s a fairly simple, straightforward story, coasting mainly on vibes and mood. Apart from repeating what a bad-ass John Wick himself is, there’s very little exposition, and it’s all streamlined and economical. You know very quickly who each character it is, and which role they play in this story. The simplicity really does give it the weight of modern mythology: a bunch of archetypes playing their parts in a simple story about revenge.

And about this recurring idea of “honor among killers,” which is bullshit in the real world but makes perfect sense in an action movie that’s presented almost like a fable.

If anything, I wish they’d gone farther into making Wick a super-hero. Have him doing five-finger death punches and the like, without ever breaking a sweat. When commenting on one of his many wounds, he admits that he’s “rusty.” But it creates this weird dissonance where everyone talks about him as if he’s a super-human killing machine, but the movie also wants us to relate to him as a John McClane, seat-of-his-pants type. I think it would’ve been stronger if they hadn’t bothered to put any tension around his getting wounded or kidnapped, but instead made the stakes all about his allies being in jeopardy, or simply the chance that his target will get away.

I definitely wouldn’t add John Wick to my list of favorite action movies, but I was impressed by how confidently it seemed to know exactly what it wanted to do. And how it seemed to suggest a story, a history, and a world much bigger than anything they needed to actually show us.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Horny for Fan Fest

Two tunes from the extremely nostalgic background music loop at Universal’s Fan Fest nights

At the beginning of the month, we went to the Fan Fest Nights at Universal Studios Hollywood. This was the first year of the event, which was structured like Horror Nights, but for non-horror licensed IP. On the whole, it was better than I’d expected, and we enjoyed it a lot.

Two of the properties were anime, one of which (One Piece) we were aware of and the other one neither of us had even heard of. We don’t go to anything in the Harry Potter section of the park anymore, because of the asshole author who still profits from it. So it was just Dungeons & Dragons, Star Trek, Back to the Future, and lower crowds in Super Nintendo World.

The D&D walkthrough was definitely the highlight, with an extremely impressive Beholder animatronic. We went through twice, and as far as I’m concerned, that alone made the night worth it. I appreciated what they were trying to do with Back to the Future — give fans a chance to walk around the actual backstage set, combining photo ops with a mini-LARP and live music on the prom stage — but neither of us are big enough fans to get the full effect. And the Star Trek walkthrough was let down a bit by its scale and scope; I just felt like I’d been spoiled by the permanent Las Vegas attraction years ago. But all the cast and team members were super friendly and seemed to be having fun, so the whole night just felt like a good time.

One thing that I especially appreciated was the loop of 1980s background music that was playing over the escalators to the lower lot and around the tram tour. If the point was nostalgia, they nailed it, because I spent the whole time having vivid sense memories of middle and high school. I felt especially at home when they started playing “Centerfold” by The J. Geils Band, which I was a little bit obsessed with back in 1981 or 82.

And I can’t say with 100% certainty that they also played “She’s a Beauty” by The Tubes,¹ because the tram ride down to the Back to the Future section played “The Power of Love” on a constant loop, which (along with “Take on Me” by a-ha) drove every other song out of my mind. But even if they didn’t, this was 100% the vibe they seemed to be going for. And I was eating it up. I was tempted to just stay on the escalators all night.

It genuinely never occurred to me just how many of the favorite songs of my adolescence were all about guys being horny for unattainable women.² I guess it should be obvious in retrospect, since that’s what adolescence is for most guys. I was just in it for the vicious guitar solos.

1
Mad props for the titty drums, guys!
2
These two and also “Photograph” by Def Leppard and “I’ll Wait” and “Hot for Teacher” by Van Halen.

Your Taste, Should You Choose to Accept It

Mission: Impossible, Letterboxd, and making peace with being basic

Apparently there’s a new Mission: Impossible movie out? Who knew? You’d think they’d have at least put up a poster or something.

I don’t know how it is in the rest of the world, but at least in Los Angeles, the advertising is inescapable. The other day I went to a mall that’s not even attached to a theater, and coming out into the atrium, I was confronted with a positively gigantic LED screen, 25 feet tall at least, showing Tom Cruise’s face squinting out over his domain. It was like being in a modern update of 1984 where a bunch of Hollywood producers had said, “Well of course our main objective is to stay true to Orwell’s original vision but also we think obviously, Big Brother should be more handsome.”

I had plans to see the new movie, but was feeling an odd combination of gastrointestinal distress and extreme lack of interest. It seemed more or less guaranteed to be an entertaining action movie with some stunts that take full advantage of the IMAX screen, but I’ve been unable to work up even the smallest bit of enthusiasm for it.

But heading into the weekend, I felt like I needed to do some prep work to get the full effect. I’ve still only ever seen the first three movies in the series, after all. (Or in other words, I stopped right before they started to get good, by most accounts). But then I saw a recap of the franchise that made me realize I actually had seen at least one of the other ones, but had forgotten everything about them. But then I realized that all the details have blurred together, and while I think I remember seeing a scene of Henry Cavill beating the hell out of somebody in a bathroom, it might’ve been The Man From UNCLE or Casino Royale or maybe it was when he was wailing on me, in one of those dreams I’m not supposed to mention in polite company?

Whatever the case, the Mission: Impossible movies just don’t resonate with me at all, and I’ve been talking a lot of shit about them on social media lately. So much so that I’ve been concerned it comes across as the type of person who is super-quick to volunteer that they have no interest in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Where I’m never quite sure how we’re supposed to react. Congratulations on your sophisticated and refined tastes, I guess?

So it’s important to be clear that whatever it is that makes Mission: Impossible movies pass through my like fiber, it’s solely a matter of preference, and no value judgment is expressed or implied. (Except for the second movie, which is just not good). I love a high-budget, well-made action movie, and I love a summer blockbuster that everybody can enjoy at the same time as a Big Event. I have less than no interest in letting my obnoxious, pretentious movie snob come back to life after I’ve done such a good job of silencing him over the past several years.

Which is something I’ve been very wary of, since I’ve gotten back into Letterboxd. I like their YouTube videos, I like the social media aspect of it, and I especially like the idea of having a movie-watching diary that doesn’t require me to devote a couple of hours to farting out a post on this blog. What I don’t like is that it keeps reminding me of everything I hated about film school and about online film and popular media commentary.

And I start to waste time thinking about stupid stuff I absolutely don’t need to think about, like whether this movie “deserves” three stars, or do I bump it down to two and a half? Do I need to add a review to clarify my rating, even if I don’t have anything particularly insightful to say? Would it be fun to write something nasty about a movie I strongly dislike, instead of just ignoring it?

It’s all in danger of becoming performative instead of participatory. Like not just wanting to engage in interesting conversation about a movie (whether positive or negative), but needing to have your tastes recognized and validated. Where it’s not a celebration, like it should be, but a challenge that you can and most likely will fail at.

For example: choosing the four favorite movies that will go at the top of your Letterboxd profile, which is part of the site’s branding, since they ask celebrities on red carpets to list their four favorites. Mine are shown at the top of this post — The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Miller’s Crossing, and Rear Window. I mean, obviously.

But I’m gradually getting the impression that the rules for choosing these are more complex than I ever imagined, and I’ve done it wrong. For instance: I’ve just outed myself as basic. You’re supposed to choose something under-appreciated, to demonstrate that you’ve got more eclectic tastes. Ideally, something that is obscure enough that few others will have chosen it, but popular enough to dispel any sense that you specifically chose the most obscure and pretentious movie that you could think of.

“What’s wrong with Empire or Raiders?!” I protest, making even clearer that I’m missing the point. It’s not that people dislike them; it’s that so many people like them that it says nothing to list them as your favorites. You want to pick something that says, “this choice tells you something specifically about me.”

But each of those movies does say something specifically about me, to the point that it almost feels like a victory. For one thing, my memory is absolutely terrible, but I still vividly remember seeing each one for the first time¹ and realizing I was seeing something that was unlike anything I’d seen before. For another, each one changed how I think about art and what I value in it. Two of them obviously played a big part in my moving to California. Rear Window was like a light bulb going off² and changed the way I interpret movies. And Miller’s Crossing carried itself like both an art film and a gangster action movie, suggesting the distinction wasn’t as rigid as I’d always assumed.

And for about as long as those have been my favorite movies, I’ve gone through cycles of being a pretentious snob, to rejecting pretentious snobbery and becoming an arrogant snob instead, to just being kind of a self-righteous contrarian, to trashing stuff if I thought it would be funny, to whatever phase I’m in now. And honestly, it just feels like a victory to realize I just can’t get that concerned about highbrow vs lowbrow, knowing that I’ve seen a lot more blockbusters that resonated with me than “art” films have.

It feels like a victory to grow up feeling like a nerd, seeing all my nerd favorites become enormously successful business to the point that you were a weirdo if you didn’t like them, and then seeing that whole fandom fracture again. It feels like a victory to know that I’ve grown out of my arrogant phase where I scoffed at Stephen Spielberg as being too “corny” or “maudlin.” And it feels like a victory to realize that absolutely none of this matters at all, but I can still find a way to try and turn it into an introspective metaphor for self-discovery and growth or whatever.

But the most valuable reminder, at least for me, is just to remember why we’re fans of stuff in the first place. Ostensibly it’s to celebrate the stuff we love, instead of knocking down the stuff we hate. To discover new details about our favorites, or to discover new favorites. And resist the urge to let out the inner arrogant film critic, and instead just choose to enjoy things and let other people enjoy things.

1
At Phipps Plaza for the Atlanta premiere, at Septum Cinemas in my hometown for a birthday party, at the Tate Center at University of Georgia, and in a cinema studies class at NYU
2
No pun intended; not a flash bulb

Literacy 2025: Book 19: Victorian Psycho

Virginia Feito’s excellent satirical novel about a governess working for a not terribly impressive family

Book
Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

Synopsis
Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House to begin her employment as governess for the wealthy Pounds family. She finds herself not terribly impressed by her employers or their children. But she continues on, learning more about the house, the family history, and the servants, while tolerating the misanthropic or sullen behavior of the children, the jealous cruelty of Mrs Pounds, and the lecherous intrusiveness of Mr Pounds. Her account culminates in the surprises she has planned for the family and their high-society guests during an extended Christmas celebration.

Notes
I don’t want to say too much about this one (but of course, will anyway), not because it’s unremarkable, or because it has significant surprises beyond what’s promised in the title and the premise, but simply because it so confidently and completely speaks for itself.

Knowing that it was so popular, and that it’s appeared on so many lists of recommended books, I went in unsure of which route it was going to take. Was it going to be a mass market black comedy, aimed at a very specific type of reader who grins as if they’re being naughty and describes it as “deliciously wicked?” Was it going to take the Lemony Snicket approach, with an understated account of the horrors and cruelties of those wacky Victorians, along with fun facts like “can you believe they used arsenic in their make-up?!” Or was it going to be a more lurid horror novel, excusing its scenes of explicit graphic violence with the reassurance that it’s okay because you see, it’s all satire?

As it turns out, there’s aspects of all of those, but it’s too insightful and confident in tone to settle into any one of them. I could immediately tell that I should stop making assumptions and just let it do its thing, when I read its excellent opening chapter, with its perfectly evocative first sentences:

Ensor House sits on a stretch of moorland, all raised brows and double chin, like a clasp-handed banker about to deliver terrible news.

I meet its mullioned eyes from the open phaeton, rolling across the moor to my destiny, my breasts jiggling in my corset.

It adopts the format of Victorian fiction, and it makes frequent explicit references to Dickens, but it never comes across as a simple parody. Instead, Feito uses the narrator’s mindset of psychopathy to make her a dispassionate observer of a society that is deeply cruel and built on a foundation of gross injustice, hidden under a performance of sophisticated manners and upstanding morality.

The subject isn’t entirely new, but the voice is. Notty isn’t presented as an anti-hero or a villain, but as someone who was created by this society and also stands outside of it. As a result, the misogyny, racism, classism, repression, and backwards science — which here, isn’t allowed to be cast as simple ignorance, but as a tool to perpetuate all the existing systems of misogyny, colonialism, and classism — isn’t allowed to be safely compartmentalized away as a product of its time. They’re universal.

Meanwhile, Notty is prone to hallucinations or delusions, and curious obsessions, but she also seems to be the only person capable of seeing what’s actually going on.

As I was reading, knowing that the book had become popular, I kept thinking, “I hope they’re not trying to turn this into a movie, because everything that makes it special is what makes it unfilmable.” But of course, they are. However, it sounds like it’s on exactly the right track, both by having Feito herself write the script, and by the perfect casting of Maika Monroe as Winifred Notty. If it is even possible to adapt what makes the book work, these are exactly the people to do it.

Verdict
A confident take on a premise that could’ve easily gone too far in any predictable direction, but manages to be both insightful and entertaining. Creates a character that refuses to be sympathetic or relatable, in a story that satirizes misogyny but never settles into a simple you go, girl! tone, and still somehow leaves the reader with the feeling that she “won.”

Two Things I Like About Poker Face Season 2

The second season of Poker Face is leaning more heavily into the comedy, but its willingness to experiment is its strength. Spoilers for the first 4 episodes.

My take on the first episode of season 2 of Poker Face was that I appreciated that they committed to being unapologetically goofy, instead of launching into a long story arc and saving the silly episodes for mid-season. As it turns out, that does seem to be less of a fun and clever misdirection, and more a like a genuine mission statement for the season.

All of the new episodes have been leaning hard into the idea that this is a comedy show first, a detective show a distant second.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since there’s been some really good stuff in every episode. It’s still a very clever and funny series, and it’s doing stuff unlike any other series in recent memory. But as someone who really enjoys over-thinking popular entertainment, it doesn’t give me a whole lot to work with.

A lot of the funniest and most satisfying moments in season one came from the format: seeing all of these weird connections forming as we go back in time and re-contextualize everything knowing Charlie was somewhere in the background, making pieces fall into place for later. Unfortunately, some of the clunkiest moments in season one came from trying to do straightforward comedy. Charlie running around wearing a horse’s head and doing slapstick being the prime example. I love it when smart, clever people let themselves be goofy and silly, but there’s a very fine line between silly and corny.

Anyway, my favorite bit in episode 3, “Whack-a-Mole,” was when the mole was using an FBI lipreader to dictate a conversation through binoculars. Hearing tense dialog delivered in a flat monotone: always hilarious. Especially when the conversation diverged into musical theater.

My favorite bit in episode 4, “The Taste of Human Blood,” was when the Flopa Cops award was being announced for Best Undercover Operation. As the winner “Diego” “Verbinski” “the Third” is announced, we see a nondescript janitor hiding behind a curtain at the back of the theater silently give himself a fist pump. Solid gold.¹

Even though the jokes are broad — and Kumail Nanjiani’s Florida Panhandle accent is horrible, even taking into account it’s trying to be over the top — the episodes still fit squarely into the “voice” of Poker Face. The guest stars are John Mulaney and Richard Kind, Gaby Hoffmann (who, like Natasha Lyonne, is a New Yorker who acted as a child and teenager and had a career resurgence as an adult) and John Sayles as a cop trying to put an end to the “Florida Man” stereotype. And the transcendent moments when a character looks into the eyes of Daisy the alligator are the kind of surreal touch you don’t expect in a detective series.

But more than that, there’s a strong sense of good-hearted morality to both of these episodes.² The first season had a recurring idea of Charlie being driven by a sense of justice, and we always had to see the bad guys get what was coming to them.

So far in season two, there’s more a sense of sympathy for the villains. Even with the mostly irredeemable character that Giancarlo Esposito played, there was an attempt to get him out alive. A lot of the time in season one, I was yelling at the screen to try and get Charlie to stop walking into danger; with episode 4 of season 2, I was yelling at Fran the cop to stop before she went too far. And even mob boss Beatrix Hasp was given more sympathy than John Mulaney’s character. Maybe it’s because killing both Richard Kind and Rhea Perlman in the same episode would’ve gone way too far, but I was happy to see her get the promise of a life in witness protection.

And that’s the last thing that makes Poker Face feel so unique: it’s eager to change up its formula and experiment with new things. The season one finale clearly set up the next season to have the same overall structure, which was abruptly wrapped up in episode 3. I’m not sure whether they planned it to be a curveball from the start, or whether they got partway into plotting the second season and realized they were bored of repeating themselves. Either way, I haven’t seen a series so willing to change its episodic TV structure and go off in new directions since The Good Place.

I’d be lying (and everyone would be able to tell I was lying) if I said I weren’t a little apprehensive about where the rest of the season is going. I’d like it to lean back into the murder mystery side of things, and hit more of a balance between comedy and detective story. But I’d be even more disappointed if it settled into boring predictability and stopped trying to do weird, new things.

1
Yes, I’m aware that they had him show up later on, remove his fake beard, and announce that he’s a cop. I’m choosing to ignore that because the joke was perfect without it.
2
And the second episode, for that matter, although I didn’t have anything of interest to say about it.

Literacy 2025: Book 18: Close to Death

Anthony Horowitz digs into the past cases of his detective partner Daniel Hawthorne

Book
Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz

Series
Book 5 in the Hawthorne and Horowitz series

Synopsis
When one of the residents of a small, gated, community in London is murdered, the neighbors are all the most obvious suspects. It became one of Daniel Hawthorne’s first cases collaborating with Scotland Yard since he left the police, and it seems like straightforward material for Anthony Horowitz’s fifth book about the brilliant detective. But Hawthorne is reluctant to give Horowitz much information about the resolution of the case, or about his partner at the time. As Horowitz wonders if he’s even got enough material for a book, he starts to learn that there are a lot of people who don’t want him digging up the past.

Notes
I’ve already been getting increasingly annoyed by this series, but keep getting them because any Anthony Horowitz book is almost always an engaging, fun read. I think this might be the point where the gimmick has finally run out of steam. The book was fine overall; it’s a decent murder mystery, even if the “locked room” component was a little bit of a cheat for most readers, and the resolution was a bit implausible. But while I really appreciated the attempt to change things up a bit with this one, while still keeping the “meta-murder mystery” feel to it, the changes left it without enough of a hook to make it interesting.

The concept behind the series is really clever. Horowitz casts himself as the Dr Watson to a brilliant fictional detective, but describes the case as if everything really happened. So there’s often a neat ambiguity between what’s real and what’s fictional, and he’s describing the process of writing the book and solving the mystery while the story is still in progress.

My main complaint with the series is that Hawthorne is such an abrasive character, without enough eccentricities to make him as appealing a character as Poirot or Sherlock Holmes. That’s not as much of a problem here, but only because Hawthorne is more or less a cipher. There’s barely any characterization at all. And his previous partner is, somehow, even less interesting. Meanwhile, Horowitz has greatly dialed back on setting himself up to be a hapless punching bag, as he throughout the other books, but ends up just mentioning his Alex Rider books over and over again.

Verdict
Still a reasonably solid murder mystery, and I do like the attempt to present the story as a work in progress, taking place at the time of the case and also in the present day. But there are very few interesting characters, and not much of a hook.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Ask For It By Name

In honor of Poker Face, two tunes tangentially related by the fact that I can never remember their titles

Episode 2 of season 2 of Poker Face is called “Last Looks,” and it prominently features the song “Sleepwalk” by Santo & Johnny. I’d recognize that steel guitar anywhere, and I feel like I would even if I didn’t spend so much time in tiki bars. But I never knew the title until this episode.¹

There must be dozens of songs like that, instrumentals that I’ve heard dozens if not hundreds of times, but have no idea of their titles, artists, or the stories behind them. Shazam can rarely hear well enough over the background noise of a bar or restaurant, and with all the talk about “AI” there’s still nothing that will answer the question “what’s that song that goes doot doot doot doot doot?” I’ve made the point of learning a few over the years, which are so ubiquitous that you hear all the time, but everybody just assumes you already know the title: “Caravan,” “Baby Elephant Walk,” and “A Taste of Honey.”

A recent victory, after years of hearing the tune but never being able to associate a title, was when I finally learned that this song is called “Afrikaan Beat” and is by Bert Kaempfert. My hope is that as I’m lying on my death bed, a familiar song comes on in the background, but nobody in the room can place it, and my last words will be “That’s ‘Girl in a Sportscar‘ by Alan Hawkshaw,” and my journey will be complete.

1
The episode also features the song “Ring My Bell” by Anita Ward, but if you don’t know the title to that one, you just aren’t listening.

Two Great Tastes (One More Thing I Love About Final Destination: Bloodlines)

Bloodlines not only nails the Final Destination formula, but also manages to give it some weight. Lots of spoilers.

This post has lots of spoilers for both Final Destination: Bloodlines and the first Final Destination movie, as well as maybe The Monkey and The Cabin in the Woods.

When I was still coming off of my high of seeing Final Destination: Bloodlines, I said that not only did it nail the formula better than any other entry in the franchise, but it also managed to avoid being completely nihilistic, and even ended on a note that was almost uplifting. I didn’t want to overstate it, but was just marveling at how it managed to lean into the black comedy inherent in the premise, but without becoming so campy or silly as to turn into a horror movie parody.

But since watching the sixth movie (and scheduling another visit to see it in IMAX), I’ve been reading through my old posts about the series, and re-watching all of the recaps on the YouTube channel Dead Meat. That reminded me of the maudlin (and in my opinion, just awful) original ending of the first Final Destination, which had the characters breaking the cycle by having our hero sacrifice himself and help bring new life into the world.

You could conclude that that’s a lesson about focus testing and studio interference, or you could conclude, as I did, that the Final Destination movies need to stick to their formula and stop trying to introduce any kind of emotional heft into a series specifically about a cast full of people all dying in absurdly improbable ways.

But then I started thinking about another scene in Bloodlines, which built off an idea from Final Destination 2: you can “satisfy” death by dying and then somehow being resurrected.¹ The character of Erik plans to save his brother Bobby, who’s next in line, by aggravating his peanut allergy until he flatlines, and then having the hospital staff bring him back.

Erik starts to get him a bag of roasted peanuts, but Bobby says as long as they’re doing this, he wants to get a pack of peanut butter cups. (Which he’s presumably never tasted, of course).² And the moment I like so much, which seemed like nothing more than a good gag at first: Bobby takes a bite of it, and he says, “It’s so good.” The reason I like it is because he’s marked for death, but he has a small moment of choosing to enjoy something.

1
Which is an idea I’ve seen pop up in several other movies since then, as well.
2
And we’re given a clear shot of the warning label on the vending machine, right before they start trying to tip it over, because this movie understands exactly how the series is all about planting ideas in the audience’s mind.

One Thing I Love About Final Destination: Bloodlines

Most horror movies lose their spark when the characters start figuring out the rules. The 6th Final Destination movie makes it part of the fun.

The Final Destination series is a perfect example of why it’s usually a bad idea for me to review a movie right after I’ve seen it. Until I get the chance to ruminate on it for a while, I’m either too positive about it¹, or I’m too negative about it.

I absolutely love the gimmick behind the series, but I was way too dismissive of them initially, and I’ve tried to set the record straight in recent years. In fact, after being too dismissive, I got weirdly possessive of the franchise enough that I never saw the fourth one, for some dumb reason like thinking it was way too early to be doing a reboot.

But in my defense, it often seems like the filmmakers aren’t quite sure what they think of the franchise, either. They seem a little bit reluctant to fully embrace the idea that these are almost black comedies as much as they are horror/suspense movies. The third has long been my favorite, because it felt like they leaned into the fact that it’s all absurd, without ever devolving fully into camp.

I’ve heard that the fifth installment gets the tone right, but I’ll never see it because it has a set piece involving LASIK surgery, which is my biggest can’t-handle.²

So I completely loved Final Destination: Bloodlines, which might be the best realization of the franchise’s premise. It was so much fun. And the horror isn’t diminished by the sense of humor, since the most horrific scenes are also inherently the funniest. I was laughing out loud while I was cringing, covering my eyes, and trying to crawl into the theater seat. Not to mention frequently reflexively covering up the most sensitive parts of my body like a hot woman in a shower in a teen sex comedy.

Also, I’m grateful to this movie for putting a permanent end to the notion that I might someday want to get a septum ring.

The best example of how the movie hits exactly the right combination of suspense and comedy is the opening set piece, which perfectly sets the tone for everything that’s to follow. It’s a staple of the franchise to start the movie with an elaborate disaster, the scale of which has increased from movie to movie. This one — following a Laura Linney-esque protagonist on a momentous date to the top of a Space Needle-inspired building — is especially drawn out. Not even so much for the scenes of disaster, but for moment after moment after moment of perfectly-executed foreshadowing. In fact, this one goes so far that it’s fiveshadowing.

Lines like “I think I’ll live” and “I’ll hang onto you” and “for the rest of my life.” An over-stuffed elevator that doesn’t seem to be functioning. A snooty maitre’d who you’re just waiting to meet a grisly fate. A tower whose groaning superstructure you can hear from the floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows. An out-of-control flambé. A glass dance floor. A chandelier shedding crystals onto the glass. A band performing a raucous version of “Shout” and encouraging the dancers to stomp on the floor. As the tension builds, there’s a mind-blowingly great sequence of quick cuts showing threats around the restaurant, including a guest cracking the top of a creme brûlée, and a carver slicing up prime rib.

And a running story of just the shittiest kid, starting with him getting yelled at for pulling a penny out of a fountain.

This sequence, and the way it’s perfectly in sync with what the audience is thinking, and the way it sadistically stretches out the tension, are a perfect encapsulation of what makes the Final Destination series so brilliant. It’s not just a case of planning out an elaborate death sequence, and it’s not even just a case of hinting at all the ways a character might possibly die in this scene. It’s knowing exactly how long to hold a moment, exactly how to plant an image in the audience’s mind that will continue to linger for the next several minutes, and exactly how to strike the right balance between suspense, horror, and comedy.

And that sequence isn’t even my favorite thing about the movie, which is a spoiler. I will say that my only criticism of the movie is that so much of it is in the trailers and teasers, so if you’re lucky enough not to have watched them yet, avoid the promotional stuff until after you’ve seen the movie. There are still some great surprises, but it did lessen the tension when I’d already seen a couple of the best set pieces.

1
I actually said I really liked Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. What’s up with that?!
2
Lots of horror posters seem to involve eye trauma over the past few years, and I wish they’d cut it out.

Literacy 2025: Book 17: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (Volume One)

Emil Ferris’s masterpiece about a young werewolf growing up in 1960s Chicago

Book
My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Volume One by Emil Ferris

Synopsis
This is the spiral-bound notebook of Karen Reyes, a 10-year-old living in a basement apartment in Chicago with her mother and older brother. She loves monster movies and horror comics, and she wishes that she’ll be bitten by an undead creature to transform her into the werewolf girl that she knows she truly is. When her troubled upstairs neighbor is killed by a gunshot, she puts on her brother’s trenchcoat and hat and becomes a noir detective on a mission to solve the case.

Notes
For years I’ve been hearing this book described as “astonishing,” “dazzling,” “beautiful,” and “profound.” All the superlatives are accurate. It’s absolutely stunning in how it combines images and words in ways that can only exist in a graphic novel, to the degree that neither seems to be a complement for the other; they inextricably linked with each other.

It also tackles some of the heaviest of heavy topics — the Holocaust, racism, homophobia, cruelty, isolation, poverty, murder, grief, guilt — in a way that doesn’t rob them of their weight and impact, but also aren’t too heavy that you want to look away or become overwhelmed. It’s all processed through the mind of a girl who’s extremely intelligent, but has a specific frame of reference (or lack thereof) for everything, so there’s a sense of fascination to it all.

And the art is stunning throughout. Karen copies the covers of her favorite horror comics (they form the chapter breaks), and she loves going to the Art Institute with her older brother and copying some of her favorite paintings. She has synesthesia, and many of the paintings have smells that trigger strong memories for her. Her drawings are mostly done in pencil with cross-hatched shading, often with colored pencil, and sometimes in ink when she’s recounting particularly traumatic events.

Volume One ends on something of a cliffhanger, and Volume Two was just released last year after a seven year delay. I’m eager to see how the story ends, but I think it’ll be a while before I tackle it. As amazing as My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is, it’s felt like a dark cloud of sadness hanging over everything.

Verdict
Undeniably a masterpiece, a look at the dark cruelty of the world and the bright moments of kindness, all interpreted by an unusually imaginative child.

One Thing I Like About Asteroid City

Even though I don’t get Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, I can still tell that Tilda Swinton did

Several years ago, I went with my family on a rare trip for us all to see a movie together. I don’t remember what we went to see, probably whatever was the blockbuster out in December 2004 that seemed like it would appeal to everyone. What I do vividly remember is that when we got to the theater, my family surprised me by telling me that they’d gotten us all tickets for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, simply because I’d said I was looking forward to seeing it.

During the scene where the crew finds the jaguar shark, and Bill Murray delivers the line, “I wonder if it remembers me,” I burst into tears. Afterwards on the drive home, I said that I’d loved it. The rest of my family said some variation on “I’m glad you liked it. I didn’t get it.”

I mention that mostly to illustrate how awesome and generous and kind my family is. But also to say that I now understand exactly how they felt. I watched Asteroid City, and I had the clear impression that it was trying very hard to say something profound, and I just plain didn’t get it.

When I finished it last night, I was content to say that it was very pretty, and I appreciated that it went so hard on its 50s aesthetic, and it did actually make me laugh a few times. (The only one I remember is when the stop-motion alien realizes he’s being photographed, and he poses with the meteor). And I thought it was interesting to switch between the movie and the movie as a play about the development and production of the play that is the movie.

But when I woke up this morning, I was bizarrely, irrationally, irritated by it. What was the point of all that?!

I guess I can appreciate the notion of Wes Anderson attempting to take the twee artifice of his movies as far as it can possibly go. Asteroid City makes the deliberate, tightly-controlled artificiality not just a stylistic choice, but an idea. An insistence that the style of unnatural compositions; stilted delivery of overly-wordy, mannered dialogue; and scene structure that leaves the purpose of each scene enigmatic; is all just presentation, but it’s not the point. That all of it is artificial, down to its core, but the point isn’t to make people believe the artifice, but to understand and feel the universal ideas floating underneath in a way that’s emotional instead of intellectual.

So, for instance, you can be looking at too many recognizable actors crammed into a fake submarine looking at a clearly fake fish and still be suddenly moved to tears. I got the sense that the equivalent scene in Asteroid City was supposed to be the one in which Jason Schwartzman’s character steps out of both the movie and the play-that-is-the-movie, and he listens as Margot Robbie’s character describes her scene that was cut from the production. But if there was something there that was intended to hit me like an emotional ton of bricks, I deftly avoided it, somehow.

I saw a blurb from a review where the reviewer confidently and simply summed it up as being “about grief.” But that’s a topic that seems to run through all of Anderson’s movies; it’s kind of like patting yourself on the back for saying a Martin Scorsese movie is “about Italians.”

Maybe it’s an extension of the idea of mannerisms piled on mannerisms, to the point that we’re completely out of touch with how we feel and why we do things. Like the conversations with Scarlett Johansson’s character, where she reveals that she’s been acting so long that she’s aware of how she’s supposed to feel, and she can perform emotions, but doesn’t actually feel them. Or the repeated scenes where the moments of genuine emotional connection in Asteroid City are described instead of performed. Or for that matter, the whole format of plays within movies within plays. (Which they completely undermine by having Bryan Cranston appear in the color segments, just for what felt like a gag that didn’t land, which annoyed the hell out of me).

Anyway, the whole point of “One Thing I Like” was to keep myself from rambling on trying to interpret everything about a movie, so I’ll just name one thing I like: Tilda Swinton’s performance as Dr Hickenlooper. There wasn’t a bad performance in the movie; everybody was doing exactly what was required by the handbook of How To Act In A Wes Anderson Film. But Swinton somehow seemed to be so thoroughly present. (I thought the same about Cate Blanchett’s performance in The Life Aquatic).

Not really naturalistic — because a naturalistic performance in this kind of movie would feel tone-deaf — but simply like she actually existed in this universe, instead of being an actor playing a character who exists in this universe. I realize I’m not breaking new ground by pointing out that Tilda Swinton is an astonishingly good actor, but this relatively small part made me think that I would believe her in anything.

Oh, I also liked that in the scene where Jason Schwartzman’s character is auditioning for the part in front of the playwright (played by Edward Norton), we get increasingly clear shots of the homoerotic art hanging on the playwright’s walls. The focus is on the performance, while a painting of a bare ass is clearly visible in the background, in spotlight. It’s never addressed or explained. (But I would’ve greatly preferred it if it had been left completely unaddressed, and hadn’t ended with a kiss that makes it feel like a cheap gag).

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Everyone Knows The Water Is Warm Enough

Two barely tangentially-related tunes in honor of Wendy Melvoin

One of my (many) cultural blind spots is that I never really got into Prince. I know all the hits, of course, and I’ve been trying to get caught up in my adult years. But back in the 80s, I categorized Prince and the Revolution as being decidedly not for me.

I remember opening the LP of 1999 and being immediately scandalized at the huge centerfold of nude Prince lying there. Oh no, I am not supposed to be seeing this! I closed it and from then on tried to ensure that my parents never witnessed what I’d bought with their money.

So I didn’t fully appreciate the video for “Kiss” until several years ago, when I finally clued into how it’s so simultaneously corny and drily funny. I never thought of Prince as having much of a sense of humor — especially since Purple Rain never struck me as anything but painfully earnest — but here he’s clearly making fun of himself and his image.

Key to all of that is stripping it down to just him and Wendy Melvoin on guitar. For those of us who only knew of Prince as being on stages surrounded by meticulously art-directed and choreographed musicians and supermodels, it was a huge change to see such a relatively spare video. If the point of the video had been simply “I write music and play a ton of instruments and am super sexy,” then it could’ve just been Prince and the veiled dancer. But since the point was to have fun and poke fun at his own image, he needed to play off one of the most talented members of his band.

And she’s always come across as so cool in that video. Absolutely part of the whole showmanship and schtick of being in The Revolution, but also grimacing when he gets uncomfortably close. “Prince is gonna Prince! Gotta love ‘im!”¹

Melvoin has done a lot outside of her work with Prince, as part of Wendy and Lisa and other collaborations both with and without Lisa Coleman, so I don’t want to diminish that. But I’m fascinated by this specific moment, when a superstar chose to be goofy and take the piss out of himself, so instead of “Waterfall” or “Computer Blue,” I’ll be corny and pair it with my favorite song by The Association. Who makes “Kiss” work? Everyone knows it’s Wendy.

1
I am vaguely aware that Wendy and Lisa were seriously on the outs with Prince for some time, but I thought it was heartwarming to hear Melvoin talk after his death about her experiences working with him.